Some questions about Spoon

[Craig Latta]

Hi Stef--

> you should have a look at the changes done in the versions until
> 3.9 since else this will be really difficult to migrate on top of
> spoon (which I would love)

     Can you be more specific about which changes you mean? In general,
I think it'll be easier to adapt changes to Spoon that it is to adapt to
other versions of Squeak, since there is less in Spoon to cause conflict
(because it's minimal).

> I cannot really believe in the "people will rewrite what they need"
> so reusing is important for me.

     I expect that people will get most of the way there by imprinting
unit tests from their previous working object memory (in 3.x and
earlier). This is the primary motivation for making a Flow release that
is compatible with 3.x and earlier. With that we can implement just
enough of the remote-messaging support and Naiad in those older systems,
so that we can imprint from there onto newer Spoon systems.

> Still I have some doubts that working on 3.2 is the best choice.

     For making a minimal system, I think it's best to start with the
earliest/smallest Squeak possible (i.e., the earliest one that has all
desired VM-dependent behavior). Initially, I had hoped that the starting
point would be Dan's 2.2 "mini" system, because the object memory part
was already pretty small. I only went forward to 3.2 because I wanted
the exception-handling and finalization support (even though both of
those could be improved-- it's easier this way rather than trying to add
them into the minimal system later). If I'm missing some some
fundamental VM-dependent support that's been added since 3.2, please let
me know what it is.


     thanks,

-C

-- 
Craig Latta
http://netjam.org/resume